Sunday, May 31, 2015

God’s Economy: What You Count

As I mentioned last week, if you count varieties of violets, you’ll start to see more varieties of violets.

Count offensive behavior and you’ll see it everywhere.

What we currently count, as indicators of our country’s health, are narrowly focused economic indicators.

One of my favorite radio voices is Kai Ryssdal, host
of NPR’s Marketplace, weekdays at 6:30 p.m, “the most widely heard program on
business and the economy – radio or television, commercial or public
broadcasting – in the country,” according to the show’s own totally unbiased
webpage.

Ryssdal interviews economists, explains terms and trends,
and midway through each show, he says, in a cheerfully irreverent tone: “Let’s
do the numbers!”

The numbers?

DOW, NASDAQ, GDP: the numbers that declare the
health of our corporations, the size of
our profits, the all important growth in our domestic production.

Our economic construct is devised to feed those particular
numbers.

And those numbers are predicated on consumption: more cars,
more burgers, more houses, more gas.

What I enjoy about Ryssdal’s show is that he’s not
convinced. He does a great job of explaining the numbers, suggesting
connections, describing the way things work.

But he also does a good job of holding those all-important
numbers at arms length. Do they matter? Sure, to someone, somewhere. To him?
Maybe not so much.

And yet, what you count is what you get.

Publicly owned American corporations, companies that have
sold stock to investors through publically traded offerings, focus strongly on
the numbers: primarily production and profit. In 1919, Henry Ford found he was
paying unexpectedly large dividends to shareholders and created a plan to
adjust his economic model to allow lower
prices, better quality, and generous benefits for workers.

The Dodge brothers, key investors who had already enjoyed
great returns on their initial investment, took Ford to court. In the ensuing
lawsuit, the judge sided with the Dodges. According to that historic decision:

A business corporation is organized and carried on
primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The powers of the directors are
to be employed for that end. The discretion of directors is to be exercised in
the choice of means to attain that end, and does not extend to a change in the
end itself, to the reduction of profits, or to the nondistribution of profits
among stockholders in order to devote them to other purposes.

As corporate litigation has unfolded across time, it’s
become clear that attention to quality is okay as long as it benefits the
bottom line, that care of workers is fine if more motivated, healthier workers
can produce more and better products.

Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your
guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of
possessions.”

And he told them this parable: “The ground of a
certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to
himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’

“Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear
down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. And
I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life
easy; eat, drink and be merry.”’

“But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very
night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have
prepared for yourself?’

“This is how it will be with whoever stores up
things for themselves but is not rich toward God.”

It’s a jarring story that calls into question much of what
we assume about profit and wealth.

According to Jesus, the rich man didn’t earn the
profit himself. It was “the ground” that yielded the harvest.

And while we might think
it’s wise to store up surplus for ourselves, God says, emphatically, “You fool!”

The story challenges the political linkage between the
Christian faith and free-market capitalism as it critiques our reliance on a
material bottom line, suggesting other metrics are needed.

In the US,
a new brand of corporation has been emerging that attempts to broaden the
bottom line and apply new metrics to corporate life. Benefit Corporations, orCertified “B” Corps, incorporate with a triple bottom line: accountability not
just to shareholders to create profit, but to workers and suppliers for fair,
safe, and healthy work environments, and to communities to protect the
environment and function in sustainable ways that benefit rather than harm
local economies.

That’s a start, but critics of our consumptive economy
suggest we need to reject completely an international metric that measures
growth in consumption, since growth in GDP is by definition dependent on growth
in consumer demand, which is in turn dependent on making consumers want more,
newer, bigger, better, to the detriment of happiness, stability, and
environmental resources.

In 1971, the Buddhist nation of Bhutan rejected the GDP as the way
to measure progress and created in its place measurable indicators of gross national happiness (GNH) based on equitable social development, cultural
preservation, conservation of the environment and promotion of good governance.
Since then, despite low per capita income and stagnant GDP, key indicators like
levels of clean drinking water, literacy, and life expectancy have been on the
rise.

In 2010, Maryland
became the first state to explore an alternate metric, adopting the GPI: theGross Progress Indicator. The 26 indicators address issues like pollution,
wetland health, college completion rates, employment, housing, cost of ozone
depletion.

Vermont and Oregon have since
implemented the same GPI and together those states have found that during the
decades their GDPs were rising, their citizens saw little benefit: “Their
workers have longer commutes, they have depleted natural resources, volunteerism
and free time have declined and income gains have been unequal."